Moving away from aids as a white gay mans disease
What does it intend to be a gay Chinese man? Dr Travis S.K. Kong, Assistant Professor of Sociology, who has interviewed homosexual men in London, Hong Kong and China and studied the issue since the 1990s, says it all depends on where you are.
Gay Chinese men in London are often regarded by their colorless Western counterparts as adolescent, asexual, or effeminate 'Madame Butterfly' types, so their identity as lgbtq+ men gets mixed up with race issues, he says.
Gay men in Hong Kong tend to be defined along economic lines - how much money they have, what clothes they wear, the languages they communicate and their social class. They care for to express their gayness through their consumption habits, and their identity is complicated by a lack of territory in which they are often confined by a family setting that makes it difficult to come out.
Gay men in China are caught in a tangle of pressures, from traditional values that insist they marry and have children, to inconsistent government policy that encourages uncover talk about sex, but also links homosexuality to HIV/AIDS infections and discourages the celebration of a gay persona. There is also an urban-rural partition in which homosexual migrant workers
Three years before the AIDS epidemic swept the nation in 1981, the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus opened its doors. We couldn't imagine how much the crisis of AIDS in 1980s would influence our community and we could not have predicted how many people would turn to the Chorus for refuge and a sense of community.
Let’s get a look back at the AIDS epidemic history over the past 40 years and how it affected not only our Chorus and our people, but our entire society.
The Beginning of the 1980s AIDS Crisis
There is no clear explanation for the cause of HIV. The first recorded case was in 1959 in a Congolese man's blood sample. While he was HIV positive, the exact details of whether he developed and died of AIDS are unknown.
Decades later when the 1980s AIDS crisis started, there was only one understanding of HIV/AIDS: it only affected new gay men. These men soon developed uncommon opportunistic infections that previously only affected individuals with compromised immune systems and scarce forms of cancer.
As a result, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) formed a Task Force in the summer of 1981 to address KS/OI (Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections).&
In “America’s Hidden HIV Epidemic,” her recent cover story for New York Times Magazine, Linda Villarosa documents the struggles of Black male lover men in Jackson, Mississippi against HIV and AIDS. The scenes she describes of young men newly diagnosed with HIV and adjacent death are shocking. The story seems like it should belong to a different era—to 1982, not 2017. Still, after decades of medical neglect shaped by racism, homophobia, and a collective indifference toward poverty, Ebony gay men in the South and across the nation continue to die of a disease that for others has long since change into a chronic but manageable condition.
Since doctors first began watching the epidemic, AIDS has disproportionately devastated African Americans, who contract HIV at higher rates and die faster than any other racial or ethnic organization. Reading Villarosa’s article, one gets the sense that Dark gay men hold been largely passive throughout the AIDS epidemic, too closeted and marginal to take action against the disease. The truth is, however, that a petty but determined number of Black gay AIDS activists have been sounding the alarm about AIDS in Black America—including among Black gay men in the South
Debunking Common Myths About HIV
Read responses to myths that 'HIV is a gay disease' or a 'death sentence,' and find other important facts about getting tested.
Myths about who contracts HIV
MYTH: “HIV is a ‘gay’ or ‘LGBTQ+’ disease.”
REALITY: While rates of HIV are disproportionately higher among members of the LGBTQ+ community, HIV is by no means confined to LGBTQ+ people. Anyone—regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender utterance or other factors—can get HIV. Calling HIV a “gay” or “LGBTQ+” disease is medically untrue and only serves to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about people living with HIV and members of the Queer community.
MYTH: “I am over 50! I don’t desire to worry about HIV.”
REALITY: HIV transmission is about behavior; not how vintage you are. Moreover, according to the CDC, older Americans are more likely to be diagnosed with HIV at a later stage of the disease.
MYTH: “I am in a monogamous relationship. I don’t have to worry about HIV.”
REALITY: It is still important to get tested for HIV even if you’re in a monogamous relationship. According to the latest estimates, 68 percent of new HIV transmissions among gay and
How AIDS Remained an Unspoken—But Deadly—Epidemic for Years
With the lack of help and directives from the government, local leaders stepped up with their own responses to the crisis. San Francisco, for example, closed its bath houses and private sex clubs in late 1984 and funded prevention education, support services and community-based research projects.
In 1981, author, essayist and playwright Larry Kramer founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first service organization set up to support H.I.V.-positive people. (Later, when he was expelled from the group for being too antagonistic, Kramer founded Act Up in 1987, a more militant organization that fought for accelerating research for a cure and an terminate to discrimination against queer men and lesbians.)
Community leaders understood that local responses alone couldn't defeat the epidemic—but a federal response was still nonexistent.
In first 1985, the CDC developed the nation's first AIDS prevention plan, spearheaded by epidemiologist Dr. Donald Francis. Washington leaders ultimately rejected it on February 4, 1985. Francis later recounted in an article in the Journal of Common Health Policy that Dr. John Be